AT&T Joining OSF

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <381 at infmx.UUCP> aland at infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes:
	[ ... ]
| *less* than lowercase.  I also prefer EBCDIC hex dumps to ASCII octal
| dumps.  Does that make me brain-damaged? (let me rephrase that; do these
| factors *alone* make me brain-damaged?  :-] :-] :-] )

	No, no, it's probably due to other causes...;-)

| The thing I *really* can't get used to: having every character I type
| (in raw mode applications, anyway) cause an interrupt, instead of being
| able to key in a screen worth before bothering the host system...

	No smiley on this one; having each character cause an interrupt
is not related to either UNIX or ASCII. UNIX supports having a smart
device driver which handles the characters and stores data via DMA,
although it costs more to have smarts on the serial or IP device. An
example of this is the Arnet board for Xenix  or ix386, which does just
what you imply.

	Since STTY options allow some character level editing, SOMETHING
has to look at every character to provide for delete character and line.
It need not be the main CPU.

================ flame suit and heavy duty jock on ================

	one of the few things I like about DOS and VMS is that the
characters are echoed as they are read, not as they are typed. This
prevents display of info designed to be read "no echo." Fortunately
there seems to be no reason why this can't be done in a device driver,
even if it's not (I would like to think it is and I haven't found it).

	I expect to be told by some people that this would be bad
because it's a feature of ugly o/s's, but I'm going to write that
device driver one day.
================================================================
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me